tombstone.gr – Sept 2002

Hello Cristina.

Hello to you Aggelos.

Tell me do you still have a hard time saying the ‘R’?

Well yes. I mean it’s not a real problem it’s more something like a personal touch. I mean I could be able to pronounce the ‘R’ right, but I don’t want to be to concentrated while I am talking or singing.

You shouldn’t be anyway. It’s kind of cute.

Actually you know it’s only in Italian because in English they have a different ‘R’, they use it in a different way, so I don’t have a problem at all.

I remember last time we talked, when you told me that you kind of had troubles with an Italian song because it started with a lot of ‘R’s’.

Yeah I know, but this is not a big deal since we don’t have many Italian songs anyway.

But you have another one in the new album, right?

Yes we do but it’s not only in Italian. It’s half and half. The verses are in Italian and the chorus is in English.

So do you plan to continue writing songs in your native language?

Oh we have to see, because of course when you write a song you have to see if the song fits with this language or not. To be honest I prefer to sing in English because it sounds more musical to my ears. But of course it all depends on the song. Not all songs are good when the lyrics are in Italian.

I think that the Italian language somehow fits with the kind of Goth atmospheric metal you play.

I don’t know because we don’t play only Goth. Our music is very aggressive as well, we’re not just melancholic, we’re not just Gothic, we’re also very rocky, and so Italian doesn’t fit very well.

I remember last time we talked you told me that you wanted to become more rock, so I think you did it in the new album, right?

Yeah, we did it and the most important thing is that we didn’t do it on purpose. Everything comes out naturally concerning the compositions with Lacuna Coil and I believe that now we are heavier compared to the music we did in the past, but we are also simpler, because we learned to work in a different way, keeping the songwriting simple but intense.

So what else is different than the previous albums?

First of all is the different songwriting I told you before. We took care more carefully everything that had to do with the sound, the guitars especially. The guitars are really in your face in the new album and we used two 7 string guitars and you can clearly hear the bombastic sound compared to the past. You also clearly see that we matured in the way we write songs. We went straight to final result avoiding all the useless things that you put into the songs. You know just because you’re anxious to write a new song and make it good, you put all the ideas into it and this can confuse you and your fans as well. So we just learned to stay simple, but still do a very, very complete song.

I also think that the arrangements are better. So did you work harder or you just became better?

I think that we just improved on the songwriting. It’s not that we worked more. You know we work a lot in perfecting the sound, but the love and the passion we put in the arrangements are the same. The songwriting is fairly different.

So you titled the album ‘Comalies’ but no matter how hard I searched I didn’t find the word. What does it means?
Well it doesn’t have a real meaning because it’s a word that doesn’t exist. Actually its game with the word ‘coma’, because we realized that after we finished the composition of the songs for this album, it was like we were writing the songs in a state of ‘coma’. Because it was like we were floating in another dimension, you know, forgetting every other thing except music. We forgot our families, homes, relatives, friends, boyfriends or girlfriends. We were totally concentrated on the album, being hypnotized, being ‘comalized’. So we said OK let’s do something with the word coma and we came up with ‘Comalies’.

They say that the third album is one of the most important albums for a band, because after two successful ones the third will establish them as a top act. So was there more pressure than normal?

We never cared about these things. I mean the most important thing is to be proud about the songs you wrote and I think that you have avoid to be scared by the pressure others try to put on you. Actually we are always pretty relaxed, because none, not the label, or anybody else ever tried to put pressure on us. We’ve always been artistically free and never scared about what people are going to say about this album because it’s the third one. We are very sure about the quality of the album, but we never felt any pressure because it’s the third one or something.

So tell me. You have three albums, two EP’s and you are one of the very few bands I know that actually get better and better in every album. But how much better can it gets?

(Laughs) Well thank you, but I don’t know. I think that as long as we have fresh ideas we will become better and better. I think that the key of our improvement is the fact that we are really open to new things and ideas. We never depend on clichis or the influences we have from old bands. We have much respect for the old bands but we like to look forward, to look at the future and not really at the past. I think that this is the point if you want to grow up as a band. You always have to have new ideas and you can only get them from new stuff.

So is there something that you want to try with Lacuna Coil but you haven’t yet?

Oh, I would love to try some different musical cultures. I would like to study more the old Japanese music and learn more about Arabian music. I would love to go in that direction but at this point I don’t know if I’ll be able to put them in the new album because so far we haven’t written anything.

So are there any plans for a tour?

Yes, we have a co-headlining tour with Sentenced in October and November that will be something like a month long probably. Then we will go back to the US, I think next year. It was supposed to be in September but the album will be released later in the US, in the end of October, so there’s no point in touring in September when the album is coming out in October. So we had to move the tour and we’ll probably be there in February.

Now another thing is that so far you have released two EP’s, so why do you insist so much in EP’s?

It’s not that we insist. The first one came out as an EP because we cut out two old songs that we didn’t like anymore. So it came out as an EP instead of an album, but to be honest it was an album. The second EP was supposed to be just a single for the Italian song, but then we realized that the price for a single CD and an EP was almost the same, so we just waned to offer something more to our fans and so we put more songs into it and it came out as an EP.

Do you plan to do the same in the future, like the single for the new album?

No, I don’t think so, because we want to take out time to write a complete album and not just use it to write songs for EPs or something. So far we have some ideas and vocal lines for the new album but we don’t have any songs and we want to keep everything for the new album, not use them in an EP.